Decolonizing Western Yoga Teaching: Your Pathway Out
Written by Healing from White Yoga under the direction and guidance of Dharmic mentors (Dharmic means Indigenous Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain people)
Are you a White \ Western yoga teacher wanting to decolonize your yoga practice? Do you recognize the cultural appropriation and harm caused by White yoga? Have you had enough of working within the corrupt western yoga industrial complex? Are you ready to stop participating in stolen and inauthentic practices and live with integrity?
Yes? That’s great! We recognize it can take a lot of courage to admit you have been participating in a system that harms, and that it can feel like a big personal sacrifice to be willing to give up something that you have been benefiting from. We know, because as former White yoga teachers, we have been in your position too! Thank you for being willing to join us in stepping away from toxic White \ Western yoga — it is essential for our collective healing and liberation.
We realize that even if you want to, you might not just be able to immediately step away from the Western yoga world, and completely stop teaching overnight. If you are somebody who can do it that way, awesome — do it! But if you need time to adjust your life, or if you aren’t sure where to start — here are the steps our South Asian mentors have asked practicing White \ Western yoga teachers to take:
- Make a public statement (or multiple statements!) recognizing the cultural appropriation of western yoga and the harm caused by it, including your own participation in it. Social media is a great way to do this. You could also put a sign up in your yoga studio, or just speak to your community.
- Put a disclaimer on your website and any social media pages, acknowledging that what you are teaching is a form of cultural appropriation, is not authentic yoga, has been stolen from Indigenous people in India, and that you have not been authorized by any traditional yoga lineage to teach it.
- Put a disclaimer statement similar to the one for your website on any advertisements for classes, workshops, yoga therapy sessions, and other yoga related events. If you can, also include your disclaimer on your student \ client release forms (if you work for someone else and don’t have the authority to add the disclaimer, make it your mission to get whoever has the authority on board with adding it.)
- At the beginning of every class \ workshop \ yoga therapy session that you teach, acknowledge that the practices you are teaching are stolen, and honor the indigenous people that they were stolen from. Teach your students to expect this.
- Stop participating in and buying into the yoga industrial complex — including attending western \ white yoga classes, workshops or conferences, paying into regulatory agencies including Yoga Alliance and International Association of Yoga Therapists, buying commercial “yoga” products — t-shirts, mats etc. or western yoga publications such as Yoga Journal. All of it perpetuates harm. Divest.
- Make payments of restitution to the Indigenous people who have been harmed by western yoga and your participation in it. Start now. Even if you are still teaching, you can be actively making payments, to mitigate the harm. Restitution in monetary form could be donations to organizations serving South Asian or Hindu people in your local area or internationally, Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist temples, South Asian activist groups etc. It’s important to pay back the money that you have earned from teaching practices that belong to someone else, and equally important to make amends in the form of advocacy and activism. Even if it is just talking to your friends and co-workers, share your experience and help educate people around the truths of western yoga.
- Make a concrete plan for a pathway out of the western yoga world and follow through with it. There are other holistic, mindfulness and movement based practices that you can teach authentically or use as a therapeutic modality — what are your options and when will you take classes? Phasing yoga out of your therapy practice — what is your timeline? Want to switch careers altogether — what steps are required? Need a new spiritual practice for yourself — what do you want it to be? What other logistical actions do you need to take, and when will you do them? What kind of support do you need? Be accountable to your community — tell them what you are going to do, show them your plan, and check in with them as you move through it, so they know if it is happening and can question you if it’s not.
- Be publicly transparent about your process of transitioning out — educate people about it as you go, particularly your students. Transparency is an important part of authenticity and integrity, be willing to use your process as an example for other people to learn from.
- Acknowledge how much money you have made from your use of yoga. Western yoga is a 16 billion dollar industry, with the majority of that money going to White westerners, and none of it going to the indigenous people who the stolen practices of yoga actually belong to. What was your share of the looted profits? State it publicly, educate people.
- Even after you have stopped teaching western yoga, and walked away completely, it is important to continue educating yourself and the people around you about cultural appropriation and the harm it causes, as well as the complex history of the colonization of yoga over the last 1000 years.
When you have divested from the corrupt and inauthentic system of western yoga, made a deep inquiry of introspection, and are making active restitution, you MIGHT find that an authentic yoga path will reveal itself to you. If you want to pursue truly learning real yoga, then start from the beginning, and learn under the guidance of a lineage based South Asian teacher. Make sure that your study and practice comes from purely a learner’s approach. Be humble and remember that these teachings take years to truly grasp and understand. Within the indigenous yoga system, one is only qualified to teach when your Guru deems you ready, and gives explicit permission. So, be prepared that in this lifetime you may never be qualified to teach. Learning from an authentic source is a gift in itself, let that be enough.
If you are feeling overwhelmed by these steps, pick the one that seems the most doable and start with that. Doing one is not enough, but it is better then doing none of them. Just putting a disclaimer on your website helps to raise public awareness & educate people, and starts to normalize western yoga teachers being transparent and taking responsibility for their part in perpetuating a system of harm. However, to be in integrity and stop causing harm, you need to eventually take all of the steps and divest completely.
If you have questions, need someone to be accountable to, want help writing a disclaimer statement or making a plan, or would like support along the way, feel free to reach out to us anytime — we are happy to talk to you and honored to help. If you are already a former western yoga teacher, we would love to hear from you too — share your story with us, or join in our activism work! You can contact us through our Healing From White Yoga Facebook page, or by email at healingfromwhiteyoga@gmail.com
